Madeleine & Salomon add French accent to American Songbook

Thursday

Jan 25, 2018 at 9:13 PMJan 25, 2018 at 9:13 PM

By Ed Symkus, Correspondent

When the duo of Madeleine & Salomon takes the stage at the Lilypad in Cambridge on Jan. 31, their introduction will probably go something like, “Please welcome, from Paris, performing music from their new album, ‘A Woman’s Journey,’ Madeleine and Salomon.”

Well, here’s an interesting note: Those aren’t their names. Vocalist and flutist Madeleine is Clotilde Rullaud, and pianist and sometime singer Salomon is Alexandre Saada. Being a bit of an oenophile, my first question to Clotilde, who was in New York at the time, was, “Did you get your name from the Italian Madeleine salomon B grape?”

She giggled at that, reacting as if it was the first time she heard the question, then said, “No, we were touring and we were at customs a lot. One day we were next to each other, and we noticed our middle names (on our passports). They are Madeleine and Salomon. Later, when we were brainstorming for a band name, one of us – I don’t remember who – said, ‘We’re going to call ourselves Madeleine & Salomon.’ We both laughed and we both thought it sounded good!”

For Clotilde, playing the flute began when she was 5, well before she was singing.

“I’ve always loved music,” she said. “Fortunately, in France, we have a conservatory of music, which is public and not very expensive, and is a place where you can learn music. So, I asked my parents if I could play flute.”

She stopped speaking, as a different memory came to her, then said, “Actually, I wanted to play the double bass, but that didn’t work out. So I chose the flute. But singing turned out to be a very natural thing for me. My dad used to play the radio all the time. We listened to Radio France, which would change from one style of music to another without any borders. There would be classical, there would be jazz, and that’s where I discovered Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong and others. The first CD I bought was Ella doing jazz standards.

“I wasn’t really thinking about singing, especially because I had all these great singers in my head,” she added. “I felt that was something unreachable, but later, when I was grown up, I met some musicians who heard me singing, and they said to me, ‘You should definitely sing.’ ”

Clotilde did sing, but her career was centered on her flute playing. At one point, about 15 years ago, she was part of a band that was put together to back a French singer, which is when she met Alexandre.

“He was playing piano in the band, and we became friends,” she said. “When the band stopped, we didn’t keep playing together, but we remained friends. About three years ago I received a commission to perform at the Melbourne Recital Centre in Australia. They wanted me to do something with an eye on the American Song Book, they wanted piano and voice, and that’s how this all started. I had all of these songs by American female singers in mind and I knew I needed a piano player that had his own sound, could go through different types of music, and would be eager to find our own way to play them. Alexandre just popped into my mind, and I invited him to do it.”

That commission and performance led to other gigs, which in turn led to their first album, “A Woman’s Journey,” which features songs by Billie Holiday (“Strange Fruit”), Nina Simone (“Four Women”), Janis Ian (“At Seventeen”), and Janis Joplin (“Mercedes Benz”). There are also tunes from Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter and Josephine Baker. But the album’s standout track is the beautiful and haunting cover of Richard and Mimi Farina’s “Swallow Song,” the only tune on the album during which Alexandre joins Clotilde in singing.

For their Lilypad show, which brings them to Cambridge for the first time (though they performed at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum last year), they intend to do the entire album, along with a few more songs.

“And we’ll have a movie screen that will show a sequence from the Roger Corman film “High School Confidential” when we do ‘No Government/High School Drag.’ ”

As on the album, Clotilde will be singing and playing flute, and Alexandre will, with the exception of singing harmony on “Swallow Song,” stick with the piano.

“And there will be some soloing, by him, some improvisational moments,” she said. “We try to build up a journey, so I don’t talk much in between the songs. We want people to get into the music, and get cool in the head.”

Asked if they already have plans for a second album, Clotilde was at first silent, then just a bit coy, giggling again, saying only, “Oh, we are thinking about something.”